Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. This week we talked about Ricketts and vitamin
Speaker 1: D and we mentioned that in sixteen sixty nine, hennig
Speaker 1: Brand figured out what phosphorus was by boiling You're in
Speaker 1: a lot of it. We have a whole episode about that.
Speaker 1: It came out on April twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 1: it is today's Saturday Classic. At the beginning of this classic,
Speaker 1: we talk about an event called Bawfest. It doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like there's been one of these in the past few years,
Speaker 1: but there are still some videos from earlier ones available
Speaker 1: on YouTube if you want to check them out. So enjoy.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Every year, there's a thing
Speaker 1: in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Bahfest. It's held another but the
Speaker 1: wedding Cambridge on the MIT campus is the one that
Speaker 1: I go to. It's the Festival of bad ad hoc Hypotheses.
Speaker 1: It's a place where people present their scientific papers, except
Speaker 1: the scientific papers are fake and all so funny and
Speaker 1: very rare, well argued and sometimes really plausible. On top
Speaker 1: of being so hilarious. So like, for example, last time,
Speaker 1: the winning talk was all about the role of noise
Speaker 1: in the spread of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century,
Speaker 1: and it was accompanied by a whole lot of pictures
Speaker 1: from illuminated manuscripts. And I don't want to get into
Speaker 1: more detail than that, because they put videos of all
Speaker 1: these things online and I want anybody who goes to
Speaker 1: watch it to see all the hilarious reveals firsthand. It
Speaker 1: is often a very cool blending of science and history
Speaker 1: and fakery and hilarity altogether. And the reason I'm talking
Speaker 1: about this is that the winners of this very silly,
Speaker 1: nerdy thing used to get a three D printed representation
Speaker 1: of Darwin looking doubtful, but now they get a trophy
Speaker 1: of hennig Brand discovering phosphorus. Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus by
Speaker 1: boiling pea. So the first time I heard about this
Speaker 1: at Bohest, I was like, we gotta do a podcast
Speaker 1: on that. It has just taken me a few years
Speaker 1: to actually get to it. In case it was not clear,
Speaker 1: this episode is going to have a lot of your
Speaker 1: in in it. Hooray. I love a p joke They're
Speaker 1: very funny to me because I'm crass. One of my
Speaker 1: cousins has a daughter who's just at the age to
Speaker 1: be having sleepovers and at the age where mentioning of
Speaker 1: any bodily function is just instantly hilarious. And I remember
Speaker 1: as a kid, if somebody was like pee pee, it
Speaker 1: would just send everyone into giggles forever. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: very different as a child, you know. I was raised
Speaker 1: with a lot of shame about your body and anything
Speaker 1: it might do or pretty until I became a little
Speaker 1: bit older and out in the world where I was like, you, guys,
Speaker 1: urine is really funny. But as a child, if you
Speaker 1: said something about p a sleepover, there would be mortification
Speaker 1: and like, oh no. A very different culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: little Victorian at my house in that. Regard to the
Speaker 1: matter in hand, phosphorus is a chemical element, and if
Speaker 1: you need a quick chemistry refresher, elements are a basic
Speaker 1: building block of matter, and elements are made of atoms,
Speaker 1: and atoms are made of sub atomic particles, but you
Speaker 1: cannot take those subatomic particles out of an atom by
Speaker 1: ordinary chemical means. A pure piece of an element like
Speaker 1: phosphorus is made of phosphorus atoms, and one atom of
Speaker 1: phosphorus is the smallest piece of phosphorus that you can get. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll take one phosphorus please. When I wrote that, I
Speaker 1: made it almost sound like all elements are made of phosphorus.
Speaker 1: That's not It's that all elements are made of atoms
Speaker 1: of that type of elements. And so several chemical elements
Speaker 1: were known to the ancient world. You'll see slightly different
Speaker 1: lists depending on where you look, but in general, humans
Speaker 1: have known about gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, ten zinc, arsenic, antimony, mercury, sulfur,
Speaker 1: and carbon for thousands of years. Pretty much any ancient
Speaker 1: culture that has written records names at least some of
Speaker 1: these in those records. These elements have all been known
Speaker 1: about for so long that we could not really say
Speaker 1: who discovered them or who first concluded that there was
Speaker 1: anything special about them. Phosphorus, on the other hand, is
Speaker 1: the first element whose discoverer we can name, and that
Speaker 1: was hennig Brand in about sixteen sixty nine. But unlike
Speaker 1: most of the other elements we just listed, phosphorus doesn't
Speaker 1: exist in its pure elemental form out in the natural world.
Speaker 1: It's extremely reactive, so instead, it's found in phosphate compounds.
Speaker 1: Those compounds are used to produce elemental phosphorus, which is
Speaker 1: called white or yellow phosphorus. White phosphorus can then be
Speaker 1: used to make more stable allotropes, including red and black phosphorus.
Speaker 1: In casual use, the words phosphorus and phosphates are used
Speaker 1: almost interchangeably, sort of like how people say carbon to
Speaker 1: mean carbon dioxide. Phosphates are fundamentally necessary to life on Earth.
Speaker 1: They're part of the structure of DNA and RNA. They're
Speaker 1: also a component and a denizene triphosphate or ATP, which
Speaker 1: carries energy within all living cells. Calcium phosphate helps provide
Speaker 1: the strength in our bones and teeth, so I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just not an exaggeration to say that we would
Speaker 1: be dead without phosphorus. Are very squishy. People have also
Speaker 1: been intentionally using phosphorus for thousands of years before Brand
Speaker 1: discovered it, without knowing that that was what they were doing.
Speaker 1: In some parts of the world, the soil doesn't contain
Speaker 1: a lot of phosphorus, and even in places where the
Speaker 1: soil starts out phosphate rich, it loses its phosphates and
Speaker 1: other nutrients over times. Through farming. For as long as
Speaker 1: people have deliberately cultivated crops, they've also understood that there
Speaker 1: was something about the soil that needed to be replenished
Speaker 1: in order for crops to continue to thrive. There a
Speaker 1: lot of the strategies people have used to try to
Speaker 1: make their crops grow better have really been adding phosphorus,
Speaker 1: along with the other essential nutrients of nitrogen and potassium,
Speaker 1: back into the soil. As examples, the practice of burning
Speaker 1: off the stubble of last year's crop doesn't just clear
Speaker 1: the land for new planting. The ash also contains phosphorus,
Speaker 1: which goes back into the soil. People have also fertilized
Speaker 1: their crops with things like manure, urine fish, and oyster shells,
Speaker 1: all of which contain phosphorus and other nutrients. Crop rotation
Speaker 1: takes advantage of the differences in how different plants use nitrogen, potassium,
Speaker 1: and phosphorus to try to keep all three of those
Speaker 1: readily available in the soil. People did things like this
Speaker 1: for centuries without knowing what phosphorus was or that the
Speaker 1: crops that they were growing needed it. Ancient people's use
Speaker 1: of phosphorus also wasn't limited to agriculture. As one example,
Speaker 1: for thousands of years, people have used stale urine to
Speaker 1: clean things. A big reason for this is that urine
Speaker 1: contains urea, which decays into ammonia when it's left out
Speaker 1: for a long time. But urine also contains a lot
Speaker 1: of phosphates, and phosphates help make other cleaning agents more efficient.
Speaker 1: Please don't take this as any sort of household cleaning tip.
Speaker 1: When we were in San Francisco at the end of
Speaker 1: our tour last year, I went to the Bookbinders Museum
Speaker 1: and that I had a guided tour of the Bookbinders Museum,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that I learned about is
Speaker 1: how in one element or one part of the book
Speaker 1: binding printing process, there were these little ink daubers that
Speaker 1: were sort of leather covered things that you would daub
Speaker 1: in the ink and you would put that on the
Speaker 1: plate that you were going to print, and if that
Speaker 1: dried out, your apprentice had to go and clean them
Speaker 1: and start completely over. So part of the apprentice's job
Speaker 1: was to keep that nice and moist. And the tour
Speaker 1: guide said, do you have any ideas of what they
Speaker 1: might have used to clean these things? And I was like,
Speaker 1: I bet it's urine, because that was the thing that
Speaker 1: I could think of. It would be, you know, in
Speaker 1: the early days of bookbinding, would probably use to be
Speaker 1: clean to clean something, and she's specified that it was
Speaker 1: stale urine, and that is for the reason that we
Speaker 1: just said. So. Of course, when Hennebrand was alive, people
Speaker 1: did not know what phosphorus was or that it was
Speaker 1: connected to all of this, and even after he made
Speaker 1: his discovery, people didn't really understand what it was he
Speaker 1: had found. At the time, European scientists still understood the
Speaker 1: world in terms of not the chemical elements that we
Speaker 1: think about today, but the four elements of earth, air, fire,
Speaker 1: and water. The field of alchemy was just starting to
Speaker 1: evolve into the field of chemistry when he lived, and
Speaker 1: the definition of elements was just starting to evolve from
Speaker 1: those four elements into more like today's definition. And there's
Speaker 1: more about the shift from alchemy to chemistry in our
Speaker 1: most recent Saturday classic, but as it relates to hennig Brand.
Speaker 1: By the sixteen sixties, there were still a few alchemists
Speaker 1: searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone, which was believed to
Speaker 1: turn base metals into gold and produce an elixir that
Speaker 1: could cure diseases in prolonged life, and Brand was one
Speaker 1: of them. Hennigbrand's discovery of phosphorus came about because he
Speaker 1: thought the secret to the Philosopher's Stone might be found
Speaker 1: in urine, and we'll get to why he thought that
Speaker 1: on how he made his discovery after a sponsor break.
Speaker 1: We do not know all that much about Hennig Brand
Speaker 1: as a person. Sometimes as is spelled Hennig instead of Hennig.
Speaker 1: Sometimes his last name is br a and T or
Speaker 1: brn d T instead of br and D. He was
Speaker 1: probably born in Hamburg and what's now Germany sometime around
Speaker 1: sixteen thirty. He seems to have spent some time as
Speaker 1: a low level army officer during the Thirty Years War,
Speaker 1: and that suggests that he was from a middle class
Speaker 1: family because he was an officer, so probably they were
Speaker 1: not very poor, but also he was not of a
Speaker 1: very high rank, so they probably weren't all that prominent either.
Speaker 1: In addition to his army service, Brand seems to have
Speaker 1: done at least part of an apprenticeship with a glass
Speaker 1: blower before turning his attention to alchemy. This would have
Speaker 1: given him the skills to make some of the glass
Speaker 1: vessels used in alchemy, and a glass blower's furnace would
Speaker 1: have been useful to his alchemical pursuits as well. At
Speaker 1: some point in all of this, he married a woman
Speaker 1: whose dowry was large enough to fund his research. After
Speaker 1: Brand's first wife died, he remarried a woman named Margaretta,
Speaker 1: who had also been married before. Her son became Brand's
Speaker 1: assistant in his workshop, and her family's money continued to
Speaker 1: pay for all of his experiments. He may have also
Speaker 1: presented himself as a physician, although according to a nineteenth
Speaker 1: century history of chemistry, he was quote an uncouth physician
Speaker 1: who knew not a word of Latin. As we said
Speaker 1: before the break, Brand was looking for the Philosopher's Stone,
Speaker 1: which was believed to turn base metals into gold and
Speaker 1: produce the elixir of life. Many alchemists believed that the
Speaker 1: key to the Philosopher's Stone was somewhere in human bodily fluids,
Speaker 1: and the fluid the Brand focused on was p Not
Speaker 1: only is urine a bodily fluid, but it is also yellow,
Speaker 1: you know, like gold to be clear. Bread was not
Speaker 1: the only person who thought that maybe urine had something
Speaker 1: to do with gold. Urine was pretty mysterious at the time.
Speaker 1: Nobody knew how the body produced it or why it
Speaker 1: was yellow, but they did know that it did all
Speaker 1: kinds of fascinating and seemingly magical things. We talked about.
Speaker 1: It uses a cleaning agent before the break, but it
Speaker 1: was also used in tanning leather and dying fabric, and
Speaker 1: in all kinds of alchemical recipes. Urine was also used
Speaker 1: in some methods of making saltpeter, and then the saltpeter
Speaker 1: was used to make gunpowder, so part of gunpowder was
Speaker 1: from urine. With all of those things going on, it
Speaker 1: wasn't really that much of a stretch for people to
Speaker 1: suspect that this strange, potent, seemingly slightly magical liquid might
Speaker 1: be yellow because it contained gold. Today, though, we know
Speaker 1: that the yellow color mostly comes from a substance called urobilin,
Speaker 1: which is one of the end products of the bodies
Speaker 1: breaking down the iron containing molecule. Heame brands experiments with
Speaker 1: urine involved boiling it over and over in a vessel
Speaker 1: called a retort. A retort is a spherical vessel with
Speaker 1: a long, downward pointing spout. If you heat up something
Speaker 1: in a retort. The vapor rises then condenses in that
Speaker 1: long spout, so you can use it to distill things.
Speaker 1: As Brand was distilling urine in his retort, the fluid
Speaker 1: dripping out of the spout started spontaneously bursting into flame.
Speaker 1: And it also smelled very strongly of garlic. And he
Speaker 1: found if he caught it in a vessel and then
Speaker 1: stoppered the vessel up, it would glow regardless of whether
Speaker 1: it had been exposed to any light. I'm sorry to laugh, Brand,
Speaker 1: it's funny, though. It's like my fiery garlic glopie. I
Speaker 1: don't The whole thing is very funny. Brand thought that
Speaker 1: he was onto something, perhaps even the Philosopher's stone, so
Speaker 1: he kept refining his process, producing this whitish waxy substance
Speaker 1: that was very volatile if exposed to air, and it
Speaker 1: had a bluish glow if it was kept away from air.
Speaker 1: Here is his recipe for making phosphorus, as published in
Speaker 1: Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the late eminent doctor Robert Hook,
Speaker 1: which was published in London in seventeen twenty six. Since
Speaker 1: this was almost sixty years after Brand's discovery and recorded
Speaker 1: by a different person, It is likely that various steps
Speaker 1: have been changed or added, but this definitely will give
Speaker 1: you a sense of what all was involved in this.
Speaker 1: So under the heading Phosphorose Elementaris by doctor Brandt of Hamburg,
Speaker 1: it reads quote, take a quantity of urine, not less
Speaker 1: for one experiment than fifty or sixty pails full. Let
Speaker 1: it lie steeping in one or more tubs or an
Speaker 1: hogshead of oaken wood, till it putrefy and breed worms,
Speaker 1: as it will do in fourteen or fifteen days. Then
Speaker 1: in a large kettle, let some of it boil on
Speaker 1: a strong fire, and as it consumes and evaporates, pour
Speaker 1: in more and so on, till at last the whole
Speaker 1: quantity be reduced to a paste, or rather a hard
Speaker 1: coal or crust, which it will resemble. And this may
Speaker 1: be done in two or three days, if the fire
Speaker 1: well tended, but else it may be doing a fortnight
Speaker 1: or more. So for one batch of phosphorus, brand was
Speaker 1: leaving urineo out in pails for about two weeks and
Speaker 1: then boiling it for between two and fourteen days, and
Speaker 1: that is not the end of the process. From there
Speaker 1: you powder the previously made coal or crust end quote,
Speaker 1: add there to some fair water about fifteen fingers high
Speaker 1: or four times as high as the powder, and boil
Speaker 1: them together for one quarter of an hour. Then strain
Speaker 1: the liquor and all through a woolen cloth. That which
Speaker 1: sticks behind may be thrown away, but the liquor that
Speaker 1: passes must be taken and boiled till it come to
Speaker 1: a salt, which will be in a few hours. This
Speaker 1: recipe continues on with adding more ingredients and steeping them
Speaker 1: together until the substance became sort of a pap which
Speaker 1: left behind a red or reddish salt after being evaporated
Speaker 1: in sand. And then that went into a retort and
Speaker 1: quote for the first hour began with a small fire,
Speaker 1: more the next, a greater, the third and the fourth,
Speaker 1: and then continue it as high as you can for
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, sometimes by the force of fire. Twelve
Speaker 1: hours proves enough for when you free the recipient white
Speaker 1: and shining with the fire, and there are no more
Speaker 1: flashes or as it were, blasts of wind coming from
Speaker 1: time to time from the retort, then the work is finished,
Speaker 1: and you may with a feather gather the fire together
Speaker 1: or scrape it off with a knife where it sticks.
Speaker 1: This recipe goes on to stress the need to preserve
Speaker 1: this fire in an airtight container, and how if you
Speaker 1: put it in the sun it might quote kindle gunpowder.
Speaker 1: I think that might just mean explode. Uh. This. This
Speaker 1: recipe also contains a cautionary tale quote. My author says
Speaker 1: he had once wrapped a knob in wax at Hanover,
Speaker 1: and it being in his pocket, and he busy near
Speaker 1: the fire, the very heat of it let inflame and
Speaker 1: burned all his clothes and his fingers also, for though
Speaker 1: he rubbed them in the dirt, nothing would quench it
Speaker 1: unless he had water. He was ill for fifteen days
Speaker 1: and the skin came off. So don't do that. We
Speaker 1: should note that it's possible that Paracelsus used a similar
Speaker 1: process to produce phosphorus. In the sixteenth century, more than
Speaker 1: one hundred years before Brand's discovery, he wrote about a
Speaker 1: process for repeatedly distilling urine, which would cause what he
Speaker 1: described as the earth, air, and water to rise while
Speaker 1: the fire fell out of it. After doing this several times,
Speaker 1: he said there would be quote congealed certain icicles, which
Speaker 1: are the element of fire. That sounds close enough to
Speaker 1: what Brand was doing that these icicles could have been phosphorus,
Speaker 1: but we also really don't know. It just merits mentioning
Speaker 1: as a potential comparative. Paracelsus has been on my episode
Speaker 1: list for a very long time, long enough that I
Speaker 1: was getting ready to do it, and then saw Bones
Speaker 1: did it, and I didn't want to feel like I
Speaker 1: was copying saw Bones, even though not everybody listens to
Speaker 1: both shows. But now it's been long enough, maybe he
Speaker 1: will creep farther up the list. There are also other
Speaker 1: accounts that describe Brand's process a little differently than that
Speaker 1: recipe that we just went through, and in one of them,
Speaker 1: the salts that are produced after the first round of
Speaker 1: distilling the urine are discarded. That is actually where most
Speaker 1: of the phosphorus would have been at that point in
Speaker 1: the process, So if Brand was doing it that way,
Speaker 1: he would have been throwing away most of what he
Speaker 1: was trying to get. Regardless, though this was a long, involved, complicated,
Speaker 1: and frankly gross process, a seventeen sixty seven Dictionary of
Speaker 1: Chemistry described it as more curious than useful, along with
Speaker 1: being quote both costly and embarrassing. But Brand was very
Speaker 1: fond of his costly embarrassing discovery. He named it cold
Speaker 1: fire or sometimes just my fire. It's not clear who
Speaker 1: was the first person to call it phosphorus, which is
Speaker 1: from Latin words that mean bringer of light or light bringer.
Speaker 1: That same term has also been used to describe a
Speaker 1: variety of other glowing substances. Brand kept his discovery secret
Speaker 1: for about six years, and we'll get to what happened
Speaker 1: when knowledge spread about it after we first have a
Speaker 1: little sponsor break. Henig Brand's discovery became public knowledge through
Speaker 1: a murky series of events involving two other men named
Speaker 1: Johann Kunkel and Johann Daniel Kraft, who, like a lot
Speaker 1: of other people in the story, worked in both chemistry
Speaker 1: and alchemy. It seems as though Kunkle had a piece
Speaker 1: of Bologna's Stone, and this was a rock that was
Speaker 1: first described in sixteen oh three by Vincenzo Casciolo, and
Speaker 1: this stone glowed in the dark. Casciolo was a shoemaker,
Speaker 1: and like so many other people, he was hoping to
Speaker 1: find gold. He had collected a bunch of interesting rocks
Speaker 1: from the mountains near his home in Bologna in what
Speaker 1: is now Italy, and he discovered that if you ba
Speaker 1: them and then left them out in the sun. They
Speaker 1: would glow in the dark. Bologna stone became a curiosity
Speaker 1: and a source of fascination, as people wondered whether there
Speaker 1: was something magical about it and whether it might have
Speaker 1: something to do with the Philosopher's Stone. Galileo described it
Speaker 1: this way in sixteen twelve quote, it must be explained
Speaker 1: how it happens that the light is conceived into the
Speaker 1: stone and is given back after some time, as in childbirth.
Speaker 1: Today we know that Bologna stone was in fact burium sulfide.
Speaker 1: I love how so many elements of this story are
Speaker 1: like what if I baked some rocks? What if I
Speaker 1: had distilled pee? Over and over? So Kunkle was intrigued
Speaker 1: not only by Bologna stone, but also by all kinds
Speaker 1: of other luminescent substances. And so when he heard that
Speaker 1: somebody in Hamburg had created something that glowed indefinitely, he
Speaker 1: got really excited, and he wrote a letter to Kraft
Speaker 1: about going to Hamburg to see what this was all about.
Speaker 1: In some versions of this story, Kunkle and Kraft went
Speaker 1: together and Bram taught them both how to make phosphorus.
Speaker 1: After Kraft paid him to do it, But in other
Speaker 1: versions of the story, Kraft swooped in ahead of Kunkle
Speaker 1: and paid Brand not only to show him how to
Speaker 1: make phosphorus, but also to keep that information from Kraft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then that version of Storycraft had to work it out
Speaker 1: for himself, and regardless of which of these is more accurate,
Speaker 1: both Kunkle and Craft did wind up knowing how to
Speaker 1: make phosphorus. Kraft started traveling around Europe with phosphorus and
Speaker 1: other glowing substances, and he did experiments with them before
Speaker 1: nobles and dignitaries. This included Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke Elector of Brandenburg, Prussia,
Speaker 1: on April twenty fourth of sixteen seventy six, and then
Speaker 1: a year later Kraft did the same at the court
Speaker 1: of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick, Luneburg and Hanover. Kraft's
Speaker 1: friend Gottfried Vilhelm Leibnitz, was, among other things, the Duke's librarian,
Speaker 1: and Leibniz suggested that maybe phosphorus could be used to
Speaker 1: light a whole room, but Kraft said production of that
Speaker 1: much of it would be just way too difficult. Even so,
Speaker 1: the Duke became intrigued with the idea of setting up
Speaker 1: a mass production facility out in the Hartz Mountains, presumably
Speaker 1: so the smell of it wouldn't bother people. Leibnitz negotiated
Speaker 1: with Brand to come to Hanover to work on the project,
Speaker 1: and he recruited a workforce and started stockpiling lots of
Speaker 1: firewood and barrels full of urine. It's not a hundred
Speaker 1: percent clear where all of this urine came from in
Speaker 1: these stories, Like there's one account that says that Brand
Speaker 1: had a relationship with a tavern keeper or a brewer
Speaker 1: or some other person who would have a clientele that
Speaker 1: peeded a lot, but it's a little vague. Meanwhile, Gustav Adolf,
Speaker 1: the Duke of Mecklenburg Gustrau, also heard about phosphorus and
Speaker 1: decided that he also wanted to start a phosphorus factory
Speaker 1: as well, and this duce representative, Johad Wachi Becher, started
Speaker 1: trying to recruit Brand away from Hanover. It seems as
Speaker 1: though Brand tried to use Betcher's offer to negotiate for
Speaker 1: more money from Hanover, but he wasn't really savvy enough
Speaker 1: to do this, and instead he just came off as
Speaker 1: kind of cranky and obstinate, and in the middle of
Speaker 1: all of this, Kraft started writing to Hanover as well,
Speaker 1: suggesting that he might actually be a better manager than
Speaker 1: Brand for this whole phosphorus production project. Leibniz persuaded the
Speaker 1: Duke to keep working with Brand, and it appears that
Speaker 1: during all of this Brand did finally document his methods
Speaker 1: for making phosphorus. He apparently ran a mass production facility
Speaker 1: out in the mountains for a few months. Then in
Speaker 1: the late sixteen seventies, phosphorus and the knowledge of how
Speaker 1: to make it reached England. Robert Boyle, who was one
Speaker 1: of the founders of modern chemistry, heard about Brand's production
Speaker 1: of phosphorus from urine and he independently worked out his
Speaker 1: own way to do the same thing. About ten years later,
Speaker 1: Boyle then worked to establish a phosphorus production facility in London.
Speaker 1: As fo this first became more available, demand for its skyrocketed.
Speaker 1: It went from being a curiosity that people thought may
Speaker 1: or may not be the philosopher's stone to something that had,
Speaker 1: at least in theory practical uses. Johann Kunkel figured out
Speaker 1: how to cast phosphorus into molds underwater and wrote a
Speaker 1: treatise on the use of phosphorus in medicine called Treatise
Speaker 1: of the Phosphorus Mirabilis and its Wonderful Shining Pills. Soon,
Speaker 1: phosphorus was being marketed as a cure, all prepared in
Speaker 1: a variety of pills and oils and liniments. It was
Speaker 1: recommended for alcoholism, apoplexy, asthma, cataracts, choleracolic depression, epilepsy, fever, glaucoma, gout, impotence, migraines, paralysis, scrophula, tetanus, toothaches,
Speaker 1: and tuberculosis. And that is only to name a few.
Speaker 1: Although phosphates have some medical uses, pure phosphorus does not
Speaker 1: treat any of these things, and is in fact highly
Speaker 1: toxic and can be used as a poison. Hennigbrand died
Speaker 1: around seventeen ten, and about thirty years later Andrea Sigismund
Speaker 1: Margraf discovered phosphorus in edible seeds. He concluded that people
Speaker 1: were consuming phosphorus in their food and then excreting it
Speaker 1: in their urine, and this was the first step in
Speaker 1: the scientific communities understanding of phosphorus as a chemical element
Speaker 1: and of its movement through the world in the phosphorus cycle.
Speaker 1: This is a cycle that begins with phosphate rich rock
Speaker 1: and moves through water and soil into plants and animals,
Speaker 1: then back into the water and soil, and then into
Speaker 1: sedimentary rock. By the early nineteenth century, phosphorus was seeing
Speaker 1: large scale industrial production thanks to the discovery that it
Speaker 1: could be extracted from bone ash. Most notably, white phosphorus
Speaker 1: was used to make matches, which is something that we
Speaker 1: talked about in a prior episode on the London Match
Speaker 1: Girls Strike. White phosphorus was really dangerous though it caused
Speaker 1: a serious medical condition known as phossy jaw, and in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty nine, red phosphorus was introduced as a less
Speaker 1: dangerous substitute. By eighteen fifty one, phosphorus was seeing more
Speaker 1: practical uses, including in manufactured fertilizers. This actually led to
Speaker 1: a supply and demand problem, which led people to look
Speaker 1: for new sources of phosphorus. One of these was guano.
Speaker 1: Guano itself is rich in phosphates, nitrogen, and potassium, making
Speaker 1: it an excellent fertilizer. The sedimentary rocks that form in
Speaker 1: places with lots of guano are also rich in phosphates
Speaker 1: and This led to a land gram for islands and
Speaker 1: caves with lots of guano. In eighteen fifty six, US
Speaker 1: Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed the United
Speaker 1: States to claim uninhabited islands to mine the guano on them.
Speaker 1: They were uninhabited by people, they were inhabited by lots
Speaker 1: and lots of birds. Today, the vast majority of phosphorus
Speaker 1: is mined from rocks that are rich in calcium phosphate,
Speaker 1: and about ninety percent of that mind phosphorus is put
Speaker 1: to one use and that is back to fertilizer. Phosphorus
Speaker 1: is still used for other applications as well, including plastics,
Speaker 1: fuel additives, fireworks, rat poison, air, and of course it
Speaker 1: is still used to make matches. It used to be
Speaker 1: in a lot of detergents because, like we said earlier,
Speaker 1: it helps detergents clean better. But too much phosphate in
Speaker 1: bodies of water leads to algae overgrowth and so a
Speaker 1: lot of nations to be either banned or strictly limited
Speaker 1: the use of phosphates indetergent Phosphorus is also used in weapons,
Speaker 1: including organophosphates which are chemical weapons known as nerve gas,
Speaker 1: as well as incendiary devices and smoke screens. Ironically, Hamburg,
Speaker 1: where phosphorus was discovered, was hit with thousands of phosphorus
Speaker 1: containing incendiary bombs during Operation Gomorrah in World War Two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the use of phosphorus in weapons is pretty controversial today,
Speaker 1: but it still is used. Phosphate rock is not a
Speaker 1: renewable resource. Even though the phosphate cycle does eventually put
Speaker 1: phosphates back into rocks, it takes a really long time,
Speaker 1: and over the past few years there has been some
Speaker 1: discussion about whether the world is running out of phosphorus.
Speaker 1: Phosphorus itself is not in very short supply. It's one
Speaker 1: of the most common elements on the planet, but there's
Speaker 1: not that much of it that can be mined without
Speaker 1: huge environmental damage. Like there's a lot of phosphorus everywhere,
Speaker 1: but only a very few places with phosphorus in a
Speaker 1: high enough concentration to be able to efficiently mine it.
Speaker 1: It's not totally clear exactly how much available phosphate there
Speaker 1: is in rocks that can reasonably be mined, or when
Speaker 1: we might reach peak phosphorus. Predictions run anywhere from decades
Speaker 1: to centuries. Because the vast majority of phosphorus is used
Speaker 1: as fertilizer for plants that directly or indirectly become food.
Speaker 1: This shortage has the potential to be a global catastrophe,
Speaker 1: and one of the proposed alternatives is urine recycling or
Speaker 1: all the way back to just boiling some urine until
Speaker 1: and explode. I'm glad I got this whole Hennig brand
Speaker 1: thing out of my system after like three years of
Speaker 1: saying I should do a podcast on that guy and
Speaker 1: his weird urine boiling. Thanks so much for joining us
Speaker 1: on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
Speaker 1: our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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